


under your skin feels like home

by garden of succulents (staranise)



Series: ain't licked yet [1]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Date Night, Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 15:16:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7646281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/staranise/pseuds/garden%20of%20succulents
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kent goes to the bar again when the band exits the stage to make room for a jazz quartet.  The bartender flicks a glance up as he mixes Kent’s martini and says, “That guitarist’s putting moves on your girl.”</p><p>“Yeah?”  Kent turns back and catches Luis’s eye, hand-signals him <em>little drink or big drink?</em> and gets <em>little drink</em> back.  “Yeah, just the iced tea with that. Slice of lemon.”</p><p>“Wouldn’t put up with it myself,” the bartender says.</p><p>“Don’t sweat it, my man,” Kent reassures him.  “Not everyone’s man enough to, no shame in that.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	under your skin feels like home

**Author's Note:**

> This is a prologue to _Ain't Licked Yet_ ; about a month from now, Kent Parson's hockey career is going to end forever. Right now, though, he neither knows nor cares.

There are thousands of people in Las Vegas who neither know nor care that that there was a hockey game tonight.  In the vast ocean of black desert, the lights of the Battledome are dazzling but in their turn dwarfed by other parts of the city.  Kent climbs into a taxi outside the arena and sets out to join them.

His boyfriend’s band has scored a gig at a casino nice enough that Kent, too well-dressed to be a middle manager from Iowa, isn’t mistaken for staff.  

He gets a couple flickering glances as he winds his way through the club, _That face looks familiar_ , but nobody comments on the game or asks him for an autograph.  As he’s standing at the bar, waiting for beer and whiskey and sangria with sugar on the rim, someone chats him up and hands him a card; he’s vastly diverted to find it’s from a talent scout for a modelling agency.

“You couldn’t afford me,” he says, tucking the card in his wallet to show people later.  The bartender returns his Visa, and Kent passes the talent scout a card of his own in return, then downs his shot and carries the beer and sangria to a table.

He does have real, honest-to-God let’s-network-here business cards.  But for his 21st birthday Swoops and the rest of the team got him 500 cards with a black spade embossed on the back, and a front that simply says:  _You’ve just had a Kent Parson experience._

He has almost 200 of them left.

Maida is nursing an endlessly-refilled Coke in a corner table, defending its other chairs from encroachment with a draped black leather jacket and her booted feet.  She’s dressed up town-pretty, her hair pinned back into a fall of curls and a swoopy pink-and-orange dress that falls artfully off her shoulders.  Kent kisses her as he sets the drinks down, easing her boots back into his lap as he sits.  They twine fingers and he kisses her again.

“How was hockey?” she asks, lifting her sangria carefully.

“Hockey was dece,” he says.  If he wants to go into detail she will attentively listen, and ask things like, “That’s good, right?” and, “What about that stupid trophy thing?” and if it really matters to Kent she will treat it like something important, but she knows that one of the fundamental reasons he loves her is: she _doesn’t care_ if he won or lost tonight.

Their boyfriend’s band is announced and the two of them cheer and whistle obnoxiously until Luis, smiling and acknowledging the audience, laughs and makes a little flick with the lower two fingers holding the mic that says _shut up, you two_.  They grin at each other like guilty children and settle back to be good audience members for at least three songs, Maida licking the sugar off the rim of her glass piece by piece and Kent nursing his beer and stroking the toe of her boot with his thumb.

When Maida’s finished her sangria they tilt their chairs into the table and dance, not the only ones two-stepping to a cover of an old country classic, and they stay on the floor, though not always as partners, for pretty much most of the set.  During the guitar solo of a song Luis took six months to write he leans into the mic while he plays and says, “I see you two assholes in the back doing the tango.  This isn’t a tango,” and they collapse into each other, giggling and bending double, and retire from the floor.

Kent goes to the bar again when the band exits the stage to make room for a jazz quartet.  The bartender flicks a glance up as he mixes Kent’s martini and says, “That guitarist’s putting moves on your girl.”

“Yeah?”  Kent turns back and catches Luis’s eye, hand-signals him _little drink or big drink?_  and gets _little drink_  back.  “Yeah, just the iced tea with that. Slice of lemon.”

“Wouldn’t put up with it myself,” the bartender says.

“Don’t sweat it, my man,” Kent reassures him.  “Not everyone’s man enough to, no shame in that.”

He hugs Luis when he comes back, but he’s barely sat down before Luis has tossed down his water and said he’s ready to turn in.  They follow him when he goes to pick up his equipment, wave to his bandmates and leave through a back exit to pile into Maida and Luis’s rusty tan hatchback.  Kent settles into the back seat but before he can buckle his belt Luis turns around from the driver’s side and beckons him up so he can grab onto Kent’s tie and really and thoroughly kiss him.  “I’m really glad you were here,” he says.  Then he lets go and turns around and starts the ignition.

Kent loves, again, the feeling of leaning back in a car and letting the black-and-gold world whirl around him.  He’s not in control; he’s just a passenger.  He reaches up to the seat in front of him and twines some of Maida’s hair around his fingers.  She smiles back at him.

They know, without Kent telling him, how to get to his place and what his code for the garage is; they know which elevator to take and they know he has to hold his fob against a scanner at the door before Luis can open it and hold it for them to pass through.  Maida presses the elevator button.  Luis leans against the elevator’s glass wall, his hands in his pockets and his head tilted back, the whole ride up.

Kit pokes her head out of her basket and chirps a hello when they come in and Maida warbles back, “Hello, beautiful kitten!” and keeps her hands extended as Kit stretches, hops down, stretches again, and finally comes to butter her cheek against Maida’s fingernails.  Luis sets down his guitar, kicks his shoes off and sighs.

“Maida-my-love,” he says, and she looks back at him while scratching Kit’s forehead.  “I love you.  I loved having you there.  It can never leave this room, but I even loved that fucking tango.  But right now I’m a little angry and jealous with you that you got to dance with Kent in public and I didn’t.”

Kent puts a hand on Luis’s shoulder, ready to apologize.  Luis smiles at him, puts his hand on Kent’s, speaks to Maida again.  “If you don’t mind, and of course if Kent is agreeable, I want to spend at least an hour with him on my own.”

She finishes petting Kit, straightens up with love and understanding and mischief, comes over to hug him, be hugged by Kent, kiss both of them.  “I’m just gonna steal some of Kent’s clothes and I’ll be out of your hair,” she says.  “I’ll have a bath in the guest tub.  C’mon, Kit.”

Luis looks tired and kind of annoyed, and Kent gives him another hug, letting Luis rest his head on Kent’s shoulder.  “Good show tonight,” Kent says, his lips lightly touching Luis’s ear.

“M’glad you guys were there, because I was just not feeling it the second half,” Luis sighs.  “I don’t know if it’s still me getting over this cold, or if it’s too many shows too close together, and of course the self-defeating part of me says I’m only good at music when it’s every once in a while, when I’m called on to play consistently I can’t handle the pressures of being a real musician.  You don’t need to tell me it’s not true, I know it probably isn’t, it’s just… going through my head and giving me a bad mood.”

He lifts his head to look up and Kent knows this is probably the right moment for a kiss, and then he says, “Tell me what I can do?”

Luis smiles, leans his forehead against Kent’s jaw, then kisses it.  “If you’re up for sex, I think that would cheer me up.  If not, I’m working on some music it would help if you listened to.”

Kent takes his hand, charmed, smiling at him.  “Sex, of course.  But you… how do you really mean it, all the time? ‘No is an okay answer’ and being okay if I turn you down?”

Luis smiles and reaches up to brush an eyelash off Kent’s cheek.  “I’m okay by myself.  I know what you choose to do isn’t a judgment on me as a person, it’s about how you’re feeling and what you’re up for.  I have more than one way of making myself feel better, and the fact that you want to help at all makes me happy.”

“Sounds like witchcraft to me,” Kent says, smiling and hiding the seriousness.  Luis blows his mind, every time, with the way he talks about his feelings and needs in this reasonable, rock-steady fashion, and how he sincerely means it when he says he doesn’t judge or doesn’t mind.  Kent is a sharp, jealous creature whose wants and desires are secret most of all to himself because they shame him so much when they come to light, just having a conversation with Luis about where to go for dinner can feel like a revelation.  _“Well, I’m feeling kind of like pizza, but I can find something I like on the menu almost anywhere and it would make me unhappy if you went to oblige me and didn’t really want to.  So when you make your decision, consider me as ‘open to anything’. Except maybe Thai.”_  Luis spells out the unknowns, the unsaids, the expectations, the hidden pressure, and leaves Kent dizzyingly free to decide. 

Meanwhile Kent is the kind of person to drag Luis to the bedroom and strip for him piece by piece, and then cling to the headboard while Luis fucks him until he sees stars.

Later that night Luis is sprawled on his back and beginning to snore, and Kent wanders out into the living room.  He turns the floor lamp off so the room is only lit by the TV and light pollution from the Strip.  Maida is stretched out on the couch in Kent’s flannel pyjama bottoms and hoodie, Kit scrunched up on her chest.  She’s watching MTV through slitted eyes with the volume turned down to the lowest click.  Kent turns the TV off and Kit jumps off Maida’s chest.

“You made her leave,” Maida protests, but reaches out her arms for Kent anyway.  He bends down so she can twine them around his neck and scoops her up in a princess carry.  He carries her to bed with Kit trotting at his heels, takes the hoodie she sloughs off and throws it in a corner.  Kit wants to jump up _right now_ , of course, and like every night he unfolds the comforter from the foot of the bed and holds it for a moment, letting the cat decide if she wants to be trapped in a cavern of darkness or let him actually pull the blankets up before she settles in.

When the blankets have been moved and fussed with she pads back down from the head of the bed and settles in against Kent’s hip, in the space between Kent and Luis.  Maida reaches over Kent to scritch Kit a few times, then settles her head on Kent’s shoulder.

They sleep.


End file.
